Mt. Rainier May 15, 2009

(Remember to practically always CLICK to enlarge – and then click again.)

An easy pleasure it is again to devotionally brag about “The Mountain That Was God.” The biggest volcano in the Cascade Mountains was sometimes wrapped in theology, a divine sublimation to escape the merely mundane controversy over what to call it. The naming battle was waged for many years between the Seattle forces who favored retaining Capt. Vancouver’s name for the mountain, Mt. Rainier (Rainier was an admiral in the English Navy and fought briefly against the colonoists during the Revolutionary War), and the Tacoma forces whose name for it was considered by some to be the name or more like the name which the local natives used for it, which is Mt. Tacoma or Mt. Tahoma or something in that range. Readers of this page from a few months past may recall that this was the point of view (from Wallingford’s northwest corner of First Ave. NE and NE. 45th Street) we took of the mountain every day for a month last summer. The camera that took this view of it, however, has a bit more pixel zip – 10mg worth – and a strong optical zoom as well. Consequently, here the Holy Names Academy dome on Capitol Hill is almost crisp. The cross atop it breaks the horizon between the big mountain (Rainier/Tacoma on the right) and the little one (Little Tahoma on the left). The picture was taken in the early evening today, 5/15/2009, so the sun was from the northwest and set the north face glowing with pink smudges that may remind some of the early 20th Century landscapes of Eustace Paul Ziegler (1881 – 1969), an artist who was once very popular hereabouts and in Alaska. [By a crow’s and Google Earth’s yardsticks it is 62 miles from the Wallingford corner described above to the summit of the mountain.]